Your Right to Know

A House committee yesterday softened parts of a bill that would alter the new teacher-evaluation
system in Ohio, but the state’s largest teachers unions said they still had problems with the
plan.

The latest alterations came after some key Republican senators and associations representing
superintendents, school boards, treasurers and teachers all expressed strong opposition to the
prior House rewrite of Senate Bill 229.

Ohio teachers are undergoing state-ordered job-performance evaluations for the first time this
year. But when administrators argued that doing annual time-intensive reviews for nearly all
teachers would leave them little time to help lower-performing teachers, the
Senate voted to lessen the formal evaluations for top-rated teachers.

The House Education Committee made a variety of changes and additions to the bill, such as new
testing and making student surveys 20 percent of an evaluation. Critics argued that some of those
proposals reduced local flexibility and added more administrative burdens.

The committee approved another rewrite yesterday. Among the changes:

• Instead of setting student surveys at 20 percent of evaluations, it allows districts to go up
to 20 percent and delays their use until 2016-17.

• Unlike the earlier House version, it would allow the use of student surveys in teacher
evaluations to be part of collective bargaining, but does not allow bargaining of the details.

• It removes an earlier House-added requirement that “effective” teachers complete improvement
plans. It still requires improvement plans for those rated “developing” or “ineffective.”

• It eliminates a House-added provision that would have prohibited districts from assigning
students to a teacher rated “ineffective” for two consecutive years.

“The bill is still very in flux. I would not call this a final version at all,” said Rep.
Stephanie Kunze, R-Hilliard, a committee member.

“Kids are not machine parts. They are human beings, and there is a lot of ways to measure their
success and growth,” she said.

The Ohio Federation of Teachers and Ohio Education Association
had a handful of concerns. They argued against making student surveys part of a
teacher’s evaluation, saying they are not proven and can change behaviors of both students and
teachers for the worse.

Rep. Andrew Brenner, R-Powell, found a survey online that he said appeared simple and fair. “How
can this not be helpful? These seem like logical questions, and if a kid is going to circle ‘no’
for everything … that can be adjusted for.”

Sen. Randy Gardner, R-Bowling Green, the bill sponsor, still doesn’t like the House version of
his bill.

“We know there needs to be compromise,” he said. “The concern is, if the compromise goes so far
it dilutes the original premise of the bill — to improve the teacher-evaluation process and respond
to concerns of educators across Ohio.”